In what is arguably his greatest work of prose fiction, The Rings of Saturn (1998), the German writer WG Sebald chose to recount the natural, crushing devastation of the Great Storm of October 1987 in the same breath as his eerie description of Britain’s flat, strategically important east Suffolk landscape.
“To this day, the area between Woodbridge and the sea remains full of military installations. Time and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes barracks, gateways and fenced-off areas where, behind thin plantations of Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hangars and grass-covered bunkers, the weapons with which, if an emergency should arise, whole countries and continents can be transformed into smoking heaps of stone and ash in no time.”
Sebald was preoccupied with the horrors of war, human fragility and the poignancy of transience.
Cormac Ó Gráda’s latest book captures the sheer horror of modern warfare too. But as a problem-solving economic historian, his preoccupation is with the fragility of data in the task of measuring, as accurately as possible and with reference to complementary qualitative evidence, the full scale of civilian casualties in the two world wars of the 20th century. It is a formidable undertaking, and one that comes with “the dangers of moral relativisation”, as he himself acknowledges. He accepts that his findings will probably not please everyone, but he is adamant that historians can explain ‘different sets of atrocities without slipping into moral equivalence’.
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Widely known for his detailed work on famine in Ireland and abroad, Ó Gráda stresses that, while genocide, atrocities and bombings immediately come to mind when we think of both world wars, it was famine and famine-related diseases that constituted the greatest single cause of death – if, that is, we include war-related deaths in the new Soviet Union in the period 1918-22. For that reason, at least one-third of this work is devoted to famine. That level of attention is warranted, given that there has been no general account of famine in either war, and most especially because Ó Gráda finds that 30-35 million died from hunger and disease alone in both wars – a staggering figure given that an earlier, reputable estimate had put all civilian deaths at about 35 million.
With the use of tables and graphs, all well placed throughout the book, Ó Gráda examines those aspects of total war with which we may consider ourselves more familiar — the holocaust, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, aerial bombing — and in doing so he drills down into the numbers, qualifies where necessary, offers context and, with the weight of that huge amount of information he has marshalled, provides sobering insights into the ugly savagery of war.
In a chapter on Atrocities and other Horrors of War, he devotes a section to cannibalism, both survival and exocannibalism, the latter referring to the murderous targeting of victims rather than the consumption of those already dead. There is particularly strong evidence for this in Leningrad during the second World War. As panic gripped the city soon after the Nazi blockade in September 1941, a nurse advised a mother that it would be unwise to leave her sick child unattended. But, aside from such grim examples, Ó Gráda also points out that the mental health costs associated with the Holocaust, aerial bombing and dislocation were not borne by all victims to the same degree, and that, “in aggregate”, victims proved more resilient in the longer term than has often been stated.
With the caveat that all counts of noncombatant deaths in both world wars will always be “approximate at best”, the estimate presented here is that the civilian death toll was more than 60 million, which is far more than that earlier estimate, mentioned above. Given the horrors now unfolding around the world, Ó Gráda’s book is certainly a timely publication.
One reservation is that the current war in Ukraine, the Sudanese conflict, and the Israeli-Hamas war all deserve a fuller treatment than that provided in what is a short, and somewhat breathlessly paced, epilogue. This is particularly so with regard to Gaza, where the civilian death toll, relative to population, has made it an “outlier, even by the horrific standards of two World Wars”.
Nevertheless, Ó Gráda’s formidable talent as an economic historian brings us an extremely valuable and accessible work which is about more than numbers for the sake of numbers. It reminds us, in his words, that “the only sure way to prevent the huge cost of war in innocent civilian lives is to prevent war itself”. This is the lesson from history. As Sebald observed in another of his celebrated works, The Emigrants (1996): “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”
- Laurence Marley is a lecturer in history at the University of Galway
